when discussing lunch

A strawberry and a honeydew were in love and wanted to get married but none of their friends or family were supportive so the strawberry suggested eloping and the honeydew said, "We cantaloupe! They'd think we were bananas!"

iPhone Inspiration: Two months in random thought

As I've mentioned before, I write a lot of stuff on my iPhone. If I have an idea I consider remotely interesting or worth saving, I'll write it in the notes app of my phone, and then later I'll go through them and pick the good ones to develop as blog posts. Other times, like yesterday, I look through them and go, What the fuuuuuuck? I don't remember writing this at all. And one of the cool things about the iPhone is that it timestamps everything you write, so I even have my cell phone telling me when I wrote the things I don't recall writing. Awesome. Here, I share with you some of the most, um, memorable little snippets of things that I apparently can't remember writing over the past couple months.

March 4, 8:13 p.m.
(A drummer on the 6 train said this. I have no idea what the fuck it means. It was the only thing he said before he commenced drumming.) 


If anyone here follows science, you will know that we are in the most critical parts of life.



February 26, 9:33 a.m.
(Sometimes I see images in my brain and I have no idea where they come from, what they mean or why they are there. If I were Dalí, I would paint them, but since I am not, I just write them in my iPhone so  I won't forget. And then I forget anyway.) 

Image of a girl, topless, seen from behind, with a big analog clock drawn on her back.

What time is it?

February 26, 9:24 a.m.
(I guess this was right before the previous one.)

New York is beautiful because there is art all around. In the past three days I've seen at least three incidents of people on the subway making art. The other day I saw a young man with dark, pretty hair sketching other people on the train with no semblance of order, just violently scratching at his note pad with black ink. Then another day I saw a black boy, probably high school age, pull out a notebook, turn it to a blank page, sigh, pause and look at me. His headphones were in and I could tell he was thinking about what he wanted to write. I got off the train before I saw him write anything, but the promise of a creation is almost as weighty as the thing itself. And today, I'm standing next to an older Asian man who is flipping through a notebook filled with sketches, mostly of human faces. He's sketching now. Black pen. Light strokes. And I'm writing this as he draws. New York is inspiring because it's filled with inspired people.


February 22, 9:25 p.m.
(I wrote this when I first saw the writerly guy I mentioned above.)

A blank pad and a pen is everything.


February 8, 8:23 a.m.

Would you rather have amazing sex with mediocre people for the rest of your life, or mediocre sex with genuinely amazing people?

January 24, 5:56 p.m.

I find that I am surprised by roundness in the city. In a place where the very structure is made up of blocks, straight lines and corners, a rounded turn is a lovely rarity. Most of them are underground, which seems appropriate. A train curves around a bend in the track. Whether I'm on the train or standing on the platform looking at it, it's never an expected thing. While on the train, it's a bit more shocking. If I'm sitting, I like watching standing people sway and catch themselves on metal poles. If I'm standing, I never can remember when the turns are, no matter how much I've ridden the path, and my hands shoot out to steady myself or snatch a wall or pole.

January 21, 8:34 a.m.

Today is my first birthday in New York, and I am spending it with Lady Gaga. I really can't think of anything more appropriate. Last year I was in DC for my birthday, watching the first black president get inaugurated and watching the beginning of the dissolution of my relationship with A. That was a process that would essentially last a full year, and I am now thrilled to put it behind me.

But now is a different time. I am alone, but I celebrate my aloneness. I read books and magazine articles and I feel inspired to write, and I do. I tell my parents how much I love them. I pray thanks for my second family, here in New York. I pray thanks for my health, though it has been up and down for the last couple of months. I am 24, and though at times I feel much older, I am thankful for every minute of it. I have had several dreams in my life, and I have lived all of them. I still have some left to live, of course, but so far I feel blessed to have experienced things few get to.

Come onnnnn train I have a 9 o'clock mtg y'all.


January 20, 7:37 p.m.

Girls on the subway talking about what they would do with $3 million: "Get the fuck out of New York."  

January 15, 11:42 a.m.

I sometimes think I can see atoms. This has been happening my whole life. I see little bright particles swimming around in my eyes, usually when I'm looking at a light source or something illuminated.

When I was little and this would happen, I used to imagine I was some sort of superhuman. Like I had a special talent no one else in the history of the world has ever had. It wasn't really a marketable skill, being able to see atoms, but at least it was interesting.  

January 8, 9:59 p.m.
(On my way home from sharing some extremely stout whiskeys with Hannah.)  

This E train is so empty. We are at 23rd street now. I'm far from home. My feet are warm, and the tingling is gone. I really like Hannah but I sometimes have the bizarre experience of feeling like she is two different people. I hear her voice differently when I read her writing than when she is talking to me across a dark bar. I wonder if she perceives me that way too? I hope not. I want people reading me to hear me just as I am. But I wonder if that's impossible.

The underside of the left half of my tongue aches. It was hurting before I drank tonight. Perhaps I've been talking too much?

More people are getting on the E train now. Ugh, y'all, I hate the E train. It's the most unreliable train in Manhattan, which makes it all the more appropriate that tonight, when I felt I really needed it, it pulled in to the station right as I did. I have never greeted an E train in a head-on simultaneous collision, but tonight I did. Typical.

I feel so much tension in my body, all the time. In my back, in my legs, in my arms, in my head. I feel all curled up, like I need to unfurl like a snail. This woman across from me looks like an older version of this beautiful woman I met the other night at an event. After a while, everyone in this city starts to look the same, though no one looks like anyone else, really.

Except for me. I see my face in every face I see and every train door. It's inescapable. I remember this one time I was on the train and these two young girls got on the stop after me and I was listening to some music but I could still tell they were talking about me. They were standing directly in front of me and looking me up and down and saying things to one another. I have no idea whether they were saying good or bad things, but I remember feeling uncomfortable about it. I felt like I was 12 again and my friends were talking bad about me and I didn't know just what to do to stop them.

That was many months ago, and I was a different person. I think now I might feel differently.

Random thoughts that are too long for Twitter but still worthy of being published on the Internet

Like most people, I have a lot of random thoughts all the time. Sometimes I tweet them, and sometimes I write them down in a notebook or on my iPhone, and sometimes I just keep them to myself, only to mourn them later when I forget them. For those rare times that I find my thoughts are publish-worthy but not Twitter-worthy, I think I should be able to put them here. I'm allowed to do that because it's my blog. So there.

Some thoughts

Pretty girls never really know how pretty they are. If they know they're pretty, and even if they know they're really pretty, they can still never know exactly what they look like to other people, because they are not super-human. Even they, in all their splendiferous* physical beauty, will never be able to step outside their own consciousness and see themselves as others see them. More specifically, they will never be able to see themselves as heterosexual men who want to get in their pants see them.

Why do people say "ouch" and "ow" as opposed to, I don't know, "raj" and "yag," when they feel pain? Like why are these the chosen words we all relate to pain? They're not even real words - they're just exclamations. As a cunning linguist, I prefer to just say "fuck" and "goddamnit" when I feel pain, because at least those are real words.

There's a reason I've always had a problem with Christianity, and my reason is this: I've never been able to marry myself to the idea that what I need to achieve true personal happiness is anything separate and outside of myself. And the more I live, the more I think I'm probably right.

What if I drop a piece of trash onto the subway tracks carelessly, and a rat mistakes it for food, eats it, and then dies of internal hemorrhaging? Is that my fault, or the rat's?

The thing I hate about winter is that there's no sounding rain. Lots of snow, plenty of snow, but I miss the pounding of the water against my panes. The sound of the rain is like the forward motion of time - it never stops, until it does, and then you have no choice but to accept the silence.

Why do people go crazy? Like, legitimately, what causes psychosis? I see plenty of psychotic people in the city every single day, and I always wonder this. Like, were they always mentally ill? Or did they live as normal children, building houses out of cards and playing with toy trains and dressing their paper dolls? And if they were normal children, where, when and why did the psychotic break occur? Perhaps one day I will be crazy. Sub-thought: Craziness is really good at hide-and-seek in New York. Just this morning I was on the train with a woman who looked totally normal for the duration of our ride together, just standing near the doors, reading her book. Then right before we got to the Union Square stop, she started talking to herself and thanking people who were not, in fact, present. 

I do not and will not ever trust people who voluntarily forgo the consumption of  cheese. If you're lactose intolerant, that's one thing; you receive one sympathy vote. But if you opt out of eating cheese due to your own free will, I cannot ever trust you.

The scariest thing about the human experience is knowing that you have the power and the ability to end your own life at any given moment. I often find myself thinking about this when I see subway trains barreling toward me. The thought paralyzes me with fear.

Microwaves. We keep the same basic technology responsible for atom bombs and cancer in our homes and it is considered totally normal. WTF?

The longer I live and love, the more convinced I become that people definitely exist on different Planes of Happiness. Not like the kind that fly in the air, but like the kind in geometry. There's a reason I am 23, single, broke, living in a railroad apartment in Manhattan, putting up with a lot of inconveniences, losing sleep so that I can write, feeling like I do nothing but flail around aimlessly hoping I do something right - while others my age are engaged, married, pregnant, having babies, buying houses, and feeling very happy in their settled version of adulthood. And the reason is this: People live on different Planes of Happiness. My friends and I - having given up so much of the stability and security enjoyed my so many of our peers -  require more for our happiness. We pursue our dreams - personal, professional, and otherwise - because we demand, for our own happiness, a different level of love, friendship, accomplishment, creation and overall existence. This is why my core group of friends does not budge, but boyfriends and outer-circle friends come and go. If we're not on the same plane, it becomes apparent over time, and everything dissolves.

MRIs are the fucking scariest. thing. ever. I just had my first one recently, and it was fucking frightening. I am 100% convinced that, had they access to the technology, Medieval Torture Creative Directors (MTCD) would have lusted over this device. You know that scene from The Exorcist? Before they realize Regan's actually inhabited by a demon, her mother takes her to the doctor and they do an MRI of her brain to check for any abnormalities. Mine was just like that, minus the God-awful neck injection that must have been a regular occurrence in the 70s. A lot of people think the point of that movie is something about religion and God and Satan or something, but they are wrong: the point is that after Regan got the MRI, her symptoms only got worse, which suggests that the MRI machine actually serves as a conduit for demons who like to inhabit human bodies. After my experience, I can totally vouch for this.


*Probs made this word up